A combination of faulty sensors and mistakes by inadequately trained pilots caused an Air France jet to plunge into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people aboard, according to French investigators.

The damning report into the 2009 crash involving flight AF 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris was carried out by the Bureau of Investigations and Analysis (BEA), which has called for pilots to have better instruction on flying manually at high altitudes and stricter plane certification rules.

Airbus, manufacturer of the A330 plane, said it was working to improve speed sensors, known as pitot tubes, and making other efforts to avoid future accidents.

Air France said the pilots had "acted in line with the information provided by the cockpit instruments and systems … The reading of the various data did not enable them to apply the appropriate action."

But the BEA's findings have raised wider concerns about training for pilots flying hi-tech planes when confronted with a high-altitude crisis. The report could also have legal implications: a separate French judicial investigation is under way, and Air France and Airbus have been handed preliminary manslaughter charges.

The BEA said "human and technical factors" had caused the crash, which occurred during a stormy night flight on 1 June 2009.

Some victims' families said investigators had not paid enough attention to equipment problems during the flight, saying the pilots had struggled to cope with a barrage of inaccurate information.

Ice crystals, which blocked the pitot tubes, were the "unleashing event" that set off the plane's troubles, the chief investigator, Alain Bouillard, said. The autopilot shut down and the co-pilots were forced to fly manually while a succession of alarms went off. The captain was on a rest break.

In one fatal decision, the report says, one of the co-pilots nosed the Airbus A330 upward during a stall, instead of downward, because of false data from sensors about the plane's position.

Bouillard said that was an "important element" in the crash. He said the pilots had not understood the plane was experiencing a stall, as only an experienced crew with a clear understanding of the situation could have stabilised the aircraft in those conditions. "The crew was in a state of near-total loss of control," Bouillard said.

Robert Soulas, whose daughter and son-in-law were killed in the crash, said investigators had explained that the flight director system indicated the "erroneous information" that the plane was diving downward, "and therefore to compensate, the pilot had a tendency to pull on the throttle to make it rise up".

However, the plane was in a stall instead. A basic manoeuvre for stall recovery, which pilots are taught at the outset of their flight training, is to push the yoke forward and apply full throttle to lower the nose of the plane and build up speed. But because the pilot thought the plane was diving, he nosed up.

A French pilot, Gerard Arnoux, defended the pilots. He said: "A normal pilot on a normal airliner follows" the signals on the flight director system, which tells them to go left, right, up or down.

Central to this accident is the fact that when the automation failed, the pilots were presented with conflicting information which was obviously incorrect, said William Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. But they were unable to look through this and understand what the aircraft was actually doing. "Pilots a generation ago would have done that and understood what was going on, but [the AF447 pilots] were so conditioned to rely on the automation that they were unable to do this," he said. "This is a problem not just limited to Air France or Airbus, it's a problem we're seeing around the world because pilots are being conditioned to treat automated processed data as truth, and not compare it with the raw information that lies underneath."

Lais Seba, whose daughter Luciana Clarkson Seba, 31, was killed in the crash, said: "It's going to be forever difficult for survivors to deal with the loss of their loved ones. We are surviving. We live one day at a time, with lots of pain."

The final report included a study of the plane's black-box flight recorders, uncovered in a costly and complex search of the ocean.